Expanding Your Area Of Responsibility

I heard an interesting story this morning on the radio that got me thinking. In India there is a major problem with pollution and Indians littering. They keep very clean homes and property, but they feel that the area they are responsible for ends outside their door, or at the end of their property. This leads many to throw all their trash and waste outside, without considering trash removal (which is a whole other issue there). The American, European, and Australian born Indians that have moved back to India to get jobs, or to help their homeland are bringing a new insight to India, and are working to make a change and change the way Indians view their "Area of Responsibility".

I found the idea of an "Area of Responsibility" very interesting, and I feel that this is the first step in getting people thinking about what really is at stake when it comes to littering and pollution. If everyone would just take responsibility for their property, as well as 100 feet around their property in every direction past their property and consider this their "Area of Responsibility", then all our areas would all be overlapping. This would create a system that would at least keep the trash and waste in the landfills and our planet clean.

The key to this equation lies in getting the average person to think of why this is important. A good mental image of why this is important could be seen if you try to picture that everyone in the world is living in high rise apartment buildings. Instead of taking responsibility for their trash, if everyone just threw it out their windows to the ground below, eventually there would be mounds and mounds of trash and waste, to the point where we would not even be able to get outside without tunneling through the garbage.

If this simple task could be accomplished, then it might eventually spread into other modes of thinking, such as reducing waste, and reducing the amount of energy used in your "area of responsibility". Once this idea spread, then so would people's areas; from their property, to their neighborhood, town, city, state, country.... until we were all responsible for the entire planet's well being. The truth is that we are all responsible for the entire planet, so that we can ensure future generations will have the same planet that we have enjoyed.